L.A. City and County Workers to Offer Medical, Mental Help to Homeless People on Skid Row

Share this:

This is an archived article and the information in the article may be outdated. Please look at the time stamp on the story to see when it was last updated.

Daniel Boone, left, moves out of the street as a cleaning crew works on San Julian Street in skid row as part of a city-county program to help the homeless. (Credit: Los Angeles Times)

L.A. City and County Workers to Offer Medical, Mental Help to Homeless People on Skid Row

Daniel Boone, left, moves out of the street as a cleaning crew works on San Julian Street in skid row as part of a city-county program to help the homeless. (Credit: Los Angeles Times)

Los Angeles city and county workers launched a major effort Wednesday to clean up skid row and offer medical, mental health and social services to help an estimated 1,700 homeless people get off the streets.

Dr. Susan Partovi, the medical field director for the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, joined 35 city sanitation and street service workers, and a couple dozen mental health, medical and outreach workers, on San Julian Street between 5th and 6th streets.

“The goal is to house up to 10,000 people” in the next five years, Partovi said during a briefing before the cleanup. “Some of these people are acutely ill.”

Authorities described the $3.7-milion city-county program, called Operation Healthy Streets, as an unprecedented show of cooperation in an attempt to shake loose entrenched homelessness in the most concentrated skid row in the nation.